she lay languorously on her back, her lush, dark tresses released from their professional coiffure and cascading with calculated carelessness across the king-size pillow.
a solitary shaft of soft green neon light penetrated the curtains to her right, limning every curve of her sensuous, fertile physique. as she splayed her arms overhead in a languid, catlike stretch, her beautifully crafted breasts strained against her flimsy camisole, drawing it away from her stomach; the neon light played across the toned contours of her torso, painting them with a mesmerizing, sinewy chiaroscuro.

my gaze alit on her breasts and then meandered lazily downward along the shadowy neon outline of her stomach.
between the lines.
i finally became lost in the hazy sfumato between her legs.
her hips thrust further forward in an instinctive, primal response to my shameless staring; her legs spread just far enough for her sheer panties to divulge the outline of her clit piercing.
“naughty girl.”
i glanced knowingly into her eyes, meeting her lubricious stare with a wry, disarming smile.

her whole body softened, surrendering to the intensity of my piercing gaze, as she drew shortened breath through her softly parted lips.
she fixed me with a prurient glare, her eyes enlivened by defiant expectation as she dared me.
entreated me.
challenged me.
implored me.

shove me out of reality and into fantasy.
look into my eyes, just long enough for me to see myself as you see me.
stare into me with your icy, black gaze.
pull me into your world with a selfish gravity stronger than my own.

beat me at my own game.
destroy my smug self-importance.
set me alight, and burn me to the ground.
take the ashes in your hands and arrange them however you want.
then blow them away.

make me fall in love.
then push me away.
make me into somebody else.
then send me back to my world.
make me feel again.
then break my heart.

beauty?
to me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

~ Pablo Picasso

feminists and their ilk are infamous for asserting that beauty is socially constructed.

if taken literally, that statement is ridiculous; it’s clear that female beauty is, to first approximation, an objectively measurable quality.
whr, bmi, frankfort line, rule of fifths, nasofacial angle, etc. — no single one of these parameters captures female beauty by itself, but they can be combined into predictive formulas that are uncannily accurate, and cross-culturally robust, in predicting men’s ratings of female beauty.

however, it’s equally foolish to assert that none of men’s conception of female beauty is socially constructed.

like most claims that make up feminist cant, “beauty is a social construct” is a whole cumulus cloud of lies that has condensed around a tiny grain of actual truth. since most of my readers are well aware of the lies, it’s worth articulating the grain of truth.

specifically:
it’s obvious that, to first approximation, there is a universal standard of female beauty.
however, when i see people trying to parse the differences out to the first and second decimal places — “she’s a 9.3, she’s a 9.4” etc. — i know i’m seeing people for whom one of the following is true:
(1) they are nerds that live in their basements, nitpicking everything to death as a proxy for living it;
(2) they share the same solipsism that they are so quick to point out in women, attributing the exact niceties of their own highly granular scale to other men;
or, ironically,
(3) they are highly social and spend all their time in, and with people from, a very narrowly defined social milieu.

#1 and #2 need no explanation, but #3 runs deep. it’s one of those forces of which most people are unaware; that unawareness is precisely the source of its power.

the graduations at the highest level of the female beauty scale — even the ones that can be measured or approximated scientifically — are heavily influenced by social factors.
anyone who has actually met people from different races and different walks of life, firsthand, would know this.

there are two primary mechanisms.

1. Preselection

PUA types have expatiated on the role of preselection in amplifying a man’s attractiveness to women, but, as is so often the case in the dance of the sexes, one partner’s footwork is mirrored by the other’s.

the more socially aware a man, the more likely is his idea of female beauty to be conflated with preselection.

gedanken experiment, for the men out there:
let’s say you can have exactly one of the following as your mate of the moment, with whom you’ll be seen by your whole social circle as well as by surrounding strangers. what you’ll get to do with her, and to her, is left as an exercise for the reader, but everyone will see her on your arm:
1) gisele bundchen;
2) a random woman who is the exact ideal of the type you like to fuck. (if you say this is gisele, you are almost certainly either lying or incredibly self-unaware.)

in this experiment, most men would pick gisele — even at the cost of the extra hardness of their hard-on.
in this experiment, ALL men with extensive upper- and upper-middle-class social circles would pick gisele, even if they’d rather be fucking the other woman.
why?
one reason is preselection.
these men know, perhaps unconsciously, that being seen with a supermodel — the very quintessence of feminine beauty and desirability from a female standpoint — will up, or re-up, their status with other women. in other words, the arm candy may not be optimal from the men’s own standpoint, but it certainly is from the standpoint of other arm candy.
the man walking around with a willowy, sylphlike model is not as sexually entranced as the man walking around with a voluptuous vamp who oozes molten sexuality, but it’s a pyrrhic loss; consciously or not, he’s bartering a certain quantity of pure carnal obsession for a greater degree of power over other women, who see the apotheosis of beauty (as seen by female beholders) on his arm and fantasize themselves into her place.
it takes an uncanny level of self-awareness, a level most men simply don’t have, to tease this confounding variable out of one’s evaluation of beauty.

the power of this particular confounding variable is particularly strong when it is not attenuated by the blistering heat of prior carnal fulfillment.
most men have never known the joy of fucking the body, soul, and mind a woman who is, at least for the moment, a pure sex object; the quickening, the sudden restoration of meaning to an otherwise hollow existence, that can only come from the violently cathartic release of our true, irrational, passionate, reptilian inner nature with a partner who is far from perfect. or, indeed, if she is “perfect”, the concomitant pleasure of smashing that superficial perfection with an relentless salvo of wanton, irrepressible salaciousness — smearing her carefully applied foundation of makeup, pretense, and resistance with dirty, passionate hands powerful enough to strip away her outer layers and reveal the gloriously imperfect whore beneath.

for men who haven’t had that experience, and are thus unable to penetrate the deepest, dirtiest corners of a woman’s soul in a single, languorous, cryogenic yet burning glance, preselection is a powerful force indeed.
for those of us who have, the gentle piccolo of preselection and objective visual beauty is forever drowned out by the throbbing, tympanic beat of sexual compulsion.

2. Class Indicators

men’s notions of the zenith of beauty are also strongly influenced by social class.

the more socially successful a man, the more likely is his idea of female beauty to be shaped by the social class in which he has achieved that success.

the willowy, lissome body that would launch a thousand amex black cards would have little currency on rockaway ave., brownsville, while upper-class ideals are too narrow for the thick, curvaceous lodestars of fertility that awaken the lyrical muses of ghetto poets.
just as literal hunger awakens men’s tastes for more voluptuous women, so it goes for entire cultures.
no man is an island.
when a man is surrounded, at work and at play, by a homogeneous fraternity of buddies and colleagues who are unknowingly entrusted with enforcing the unwritten rules of their social class, he will begin to internalize those rules. with each barb, each innocent tease about his taste in women, he turns ever so slightly and imperceptibly away from his own desires, tightening the ties that at once bind, unify, and divide.

quick: think of all the men you know whose tastes in women are “freaky” or “unconventional”. (if you don’t know any such men, get out more. if you can’t stand the thought of doing that, talk to an escort or pimp sometime about the wide variety of men’s lusts, and about the surprisingly unconventional “beauty” for which high-powered men will pay good money.)
generally, the more “freaky” the tastes, the more socially unaware or reclusive the man.
why?
the relentless prodding of conformity that inevitably accompanies social success has had no opportunity to do its work on these men; so neglected, they are left honest.

—

only for us few, proud, blessed outsiders do beauty and sexual irresistibility ever converge.
and therefore, only we outsiders, for whom social constructions have disappeared and objective beauty has been engulfed by the greater force of primal impulses, can truly penetrate the deepest beauty of all — the beauty that is not skin deep, nor in the eye of the beholder, but in the flash-point of the explosion for which our own hands are the catalyst.

in this post, we deconstruct the what and how of the phrase “just be yourself”, and draw some powerful conclusions about relationship game.

the WHAT:
this is quite simple.when women tell a man “just be yourself”, what they mean is “just be congruent.”
yep. that’s it.
that’s all they mean.

now, the HOW:
this is where we’re going to need another analogy.
so far we’ve got the elastic band, which represents the sum of a woman’s experience. however, it would be inapposite to try to incorporate the man’s personality into the same image.
while there is certainly a correlation in most normal relationships — i.e., men who are more objectively “alpha” tend to stretch the woman’s experience to a greater extent — the two are not the same. much more importantly, we need an analogy that quantifies the idea of congruence.

i thought really hard for a long time — almost thirty seconds — and came up with the notion of using a mixing board, with various sliders that can be pushed anywhere from -10 to 10, to represent the male personality.

here’s the way it works:* there are alpha traits, and there are beta traits. a beta trait is NOT just the inverse of an alpha trait.
note the final sentence above: yes, kids, that’s right, alpha and beta are actually two separate concepts. in the context of a long-term relationship, as we will soon see, it’s quite possible for a man to be both an alpha and a beta. (most PUA sites are justified in ignoring this distinction, since alpha and beta traits become mutually exclusive if the timeframe is short enough.)

* there are no binaries. each trait lies on a continuum.
this one is a mindfuck for lots and lots and lots and lots of people.
in particular, most people think of these things in terms of binaries — one/zero, on/off, etc. — because binaries are soft, warm, fuzzy, and easy to understand. this is the reason why children’s literature never develops characters beyond good guys and bad guys, and it’s also the reason why kids are taught the words hot and cold before learning more finely differentiated terms, such as tepid, warm, cool, and frigid.
note, however, the terms “children’s literature” and “kids” in the above sentence. these terms are not an accident; they are there because, when it comes to human personality traits, binary thinking is juvenile thinking.

here are a few examples of alpha sliders, with approximate reference points.

ALPHA TRAIT: CONTROL THE CONVERSATION
-10 = he doesn’t talk until she lets him
-5 = she interrupts him regularly; he doesn’t interrupt her unless he’s being unusually emotional, in which case he feels apologetic for interrupting
0 = symmetric conversational pattern
+5 = he interrupts her regularly; she rarely interrupts him, in which case he will simply finish his thought anyway, ignoring what she says until he’s done talking
+10 = she doesn’t talk until he lets her

ALPHA TRAIT: ALL INTERACTION IS SEXUAL
-10 = she won’t even let him get near her
-5 = she only feels amorous on special occasions; he occasionally attempts to initiate, but will immediately back off if she rebuffs him
0 = somewhat regular sex, but almost never before “more important things” are taken care of; the couple’s general vibe when they are doing random things together is “platonic” or “playfully affectionate”
+5 = frequent sex that occasionally overtakes “more important things”; he will start to ignore her if she doesn’t give him enough physical attention
+10 = he completely ignores her unless he’s fucking her

ALPHA TRAIT: AUTHORITY
-10 = he does whatever she tells him, whenever she tells him, sometimes even before she tells him
-5 = she clearly runs the show, but he is occasionally in charge of things she doesn’t really understand
0 = fifty-fifty equalist relationship
+5 = he clearly runs the show, but she is occasionally in charge of things he doesn’t care about or doesn’t feel like doing
+10 = he runs everything; she has no say in anything

ALPHA TRAIT: INDEPENDENCE
-10 = she sets, controls, and enforces his schedule
-5 = he regularly lets her know where he is and what he’s doing, even when he’s doing relatively unimportant things, and will inconvenience himself to accommodate her schedule
0 = he doesn’t bore her with details, but lets her know his general schedule, any important events, and any significant changes; he is willing to adjust his timeline if he thinks her stuff is important enough
+5 = she only has a general idea of what he’s doing, unless she is directly involved; he isn’t willing to change his schedule for her unless the matter is extremely urgent
+10 = she never has any idea where he is, unless he’s standing directly in front of her; he makes plans as though she doesn’t even exist

those are four of them. note that these traits and scales are, for all practical purposes, universal; they are largely the same in any imaginable situation.

there are also beta sliders — for instance, affection, material provision, and attention. these are more complicated than the alpha sliders, because they are context-dependent.
for instance, the “material provision” scale is drastically different for a married man whose wife is mostly or exclusively home with their three small children than it is for a swinging single guy who’s dating one of his colleagues.
so, we’ll leave the discussion of those for later.

—

i’ve got good news and bad news.

the bad news is that there are lots of sliders, a situation that is completely as expected; no one ever said human personalities were supposed to be simple.

the good news is that a full understanding of the sliders, and an understanding of how to tweak them, will make it really easy to understand and manipulate certain aspects of your relationship.

—

here’s the key:

you are CONGRUENT, in women’s eyes, if all of the alpha sliders are set to the same number.

do the following exercise:

* read ALL the rows marked -10, and form an image of the type of man who would earn such scores.
this guy would obviously be a pathetic shell of a man.
but he would be consistent, through and through — i.e., he would “be himself”.

* now do the same for the rows marked -5, 0, +5, and +10.
check for consistency.
these men are all “being themselves”.

women have no ability to detect whether the sliders are at their default settings, so “be yourself” DOES NOT mean that you have to be who you have always been.

women are only capable of telling whether the sliders are set to the same value AS EACH OTHER. if they are, then you are “being yourself”.
even if this self differs from previous selves.

—

and now we will answer three questions, just to demonstrate the power of this sort of approach.

1. what does “just be yourself” mean?

answer: this means that women will freak the fuck out if you have vastly differing scores on any two of the alpha sliders. (remember that there are a lot more than four of them!)

2. what is “better relationship game”?

the answer to this is really simple: better relationship game means moving ALL of the alpha sliders up, by the same amount, at the same time.
notice what i said: the ANSWER is simple. i did not say that the PROCESS was simple; there are a shitload of sliders, and you have to push all of them up at the same time.

exercise:
go back and read all the 0’s again.
now read all the +5’s.
now imagine a man going gradually from all 0’s to all +5’s.
that, folks, is “better relationship game”.

—

3. why are most men so bad at improving their relationship game?
the answer to this one is also really simple: most men think that a large positive change in one of the alpha traits is equivalent to a set of small changes in several of them — e.g., that upping just one of the sliders by, say, 5 points will produce the same result as will upping five of them by 1 point each.
this reasoning is eminently understandable, but completely incorrect.
in fact, if you adjust only one of the sliders at a time, by a massive enough amount, you will sacrifice that all-important quality of CONGRUENCE.
and then, women will freak the fuck out.

exercise:
go read all the 0’s again, and imagine a man with those traits.

now imagine the following:
wifey/gf says “you’re being really rude lately” –> what this really means: dude pushed the “control the conversation” slider up to +5, but left all the others at 0
wifey/gf says “you’re too much of a horndog” –> what this really means: dude pushed the “all interaction is sexual” slider up to +5, but left all the others at 0
wifey/gf says “you’re being too bossy, i don’t like it” –> what this really means: dude pushed the authority slider up to +5, but left all the others at 0
wifey/gf says “you’re too distant” –> what this really means: dude pushed the independence slider up to +5, but left all the others at 0

finally, i’ll leave you with some shit that will shake your understanding of relationships to its very core:
now, make all four of the foregoing changes at once.
dude is now a rude, bossy horndog who is too distant…
…and wifey/gf loves every minute of it.

—

trailer for future program:
note that the optimal settings are not +10/+10/+10/+10.
it is quite possible to be too alpha.

in what distant deeps or skies
burnt the fire in thine eyes?
…
and what shoulder, and what art?
could twist the sinews of thy heart?

— william blake

—

ladies and gentlemen, the topic of today’s interdisciplinary studies class is applied physics.

refractive index:
the extent to which a material bends the rays of illumination passing through its boundary.
the higher a material’s refractive index, the greater the distortion.

total internal reflection:
a phenomenon in which no light is allowed to escape from the interior of a material, due to (a) the material’s high refractive index and (b) the oblique angle at which light hits the material’s surface.

—

today’s lesson:
the refractive index of the soul is greater than that of the eye.

as wise minds have realized since antiquity, the refractive index of the soul is so high that few can shine the light of introspection at the proper angle to see anything resembling a true picture.
the eye, however, renders much more accurate images.

the result:
most of us are generally aware of our physical “type”.
however, most of us — especially the young and innocent, whatever their age and level of experience — will have no clue whether a particular context or situation will press our arousal buttons.
until…
it just happens.

the refractive index of the soul is high indeed.

—there is a grim equivalence between the woman who, despite her plaintive lamentations of being repeatedly used and abused, continues to seek badder and badder bad boys, and the man who, despite his vocal denunciation of mercenary sluts, continues to seek provocatively-dressed and -made-up women whose every word, gesture, and subtext is designed to lull men’s instincts with the Soma of concentrated, aggressive sexuality before moving in for the coup de grâce.

we just don’t learn.

projected from the wrong angle, the light will never reach our consciousness.

total internal reflection.

—

moreover, many of our most primal situational triggers are strictly prohibited in polite society. in fact, one could form a reasonably accurate definition of “polite society” just from knowing which drives must be starved, suppressed, and shunted into more materially productive endeavors.

the result?
if and when one of these situations rears its beautifully ugly head, its raw reptilian appeal will be doubled by the sweet taste of forbidden fruit, and compounded further by deafening cognitive dissonance.

non cogito, ergo sum.
descartes was wrong.
the more our rationality is shattered, the more we feel alive.

—

now, we’ll get even more interdisciplinary, and discuss inequalities.

men are primarily aroused by concrete visual and behavioral stimuli, which are easily understood and identified.
women are primarily aroused by situational, contextual, and subtextual stimuli, which are refracted beyond recognition for all but the most coldly perceptive among us.

therefore, women’s relative powerlessness in resisting skilled seduction is real.
and actionable.
and capable of being exploited.

Sample Problem 1
if one gold-digger can dig gold from ten men, and one blessed seducer can dig gold from ten such gold-diggers, then this seducer shall receive __________

also, equalists, read the following and weep:
there is limited justification here for the claims of women caught in affairs and infidelities that “it just happened” and that they are thus less complicit in their transgressions than are men.
specifically:if a woman is subconsciously and primally seduced by a new and exciting situation, context, or subtext — of whose appeal she is really, truly, and fully unaware at the outset — then, much to the chagrin of her long-term partner, her claims of being helpless, passive prey are the naked truth.

things really do “just happen”.

this is not to excuse the ultimate conduct of such women: “is” and “ought” are not the same, nor are explanation and justification.
however, it must be accepted that women, much more than men, will find themselves in situations that stealthily build up unconscious, unexpected arousal. indeed, in less than the time required for that reptilian arousal to diffuse to the cortex, a well-executed seduction can reach fever pitch, insurmountable by any earthly means.

—

Exercise 1
the policy implications of the above, concerning men’s and women’s differential freedom of movement and association, are left as an exercise for the reader, but i will be helpful enough to point out that herein lies full justification for assigning much stricter curfews, rules, and punishments to daughters than to sons — and likewise for wives vis-à-vis husbands.

Exercise 2
likewise left as an exercise for the reader is the role of non-earthly means — such as ardent, irrational religious faith — in countering women’s otherwise irresistible arousal.
hi gorbachev!

my great-uncle stood just inches away from the old wooden radio console, his head craned toward its one remaining functional speaker as the game crackled over the AM airwaves. his beloved louisville cardinals, trailing heavily favored ohio state by only seven points, had steadily and systematically driven from deep within their own territory to within two yards of the goal line; the remaining time had ticked down to less than a minute.
my restless brain noted the eerie mirroring of his grizzled face — brought ever closer to the speaker with an almost menacing glare, as if to intimidate the announcer’s excited staccato into bringing good news — by the fresher, smoother face of the dog staring respectfully into the horn on the radio’s lovingly restored brand plate, eternally awaiting its master’s voice.
i opened my mouth, intent on breaking the tense vibe by pointing out this parallelism. as i began to deliver the quip, i fixed my gaze on his face, both wizened and wisened by a life of hard labor.
i never delivered the quip. my words were just gone, as if they had been ripped directly from the myelin express lanes leading from my brain to my mouth.
at that moment i felt the sheer magnitude of what i had always taken for granted — the passion in the hearts of men.
the passion that, when provoked, emerges from its slumber with the sound, fury, and heat of a welder’s torch, its emotional acetylene creating bonds that last a lifetime.
the passion that makes tragedy and loss saturate every molecule of a man’s body, but at the same time infuses objectively frivolous pursuits with the elixir of life to overcome such tragedies.

—

“all right boys.”
louisville had broken into the endzone with half a minute remaining, bringing the score to within one point. still, he managed these words of encouragement only sotto voce, as if trying not to lull his team into complacency.

—

two and a half years earlier, he had taken his beloved wife to the dealership to take delivery of the new pickup that was her birthday present. though normally the type to insist on driving when they were together, he had handed her the keys for the ceremonial first drive.
she never made it home.

—

a commercial break ensued.
despite the touchdown, which had capped an impressive scoring drive, my great-uncle marched toward the bathroom with no hint of joy or hope piercing his characteristic impassive scowl. he strode past the old, slightly cockeyed screen door, which had gradually drifted wide open on its freshly oiled hinges, and slammed it shut with unusually vigorous derision.
“fucking door.”
he was a man of few words.

he had slammed the door so hard that it vibrated lazily on the hinges, preventing its lip from securely entering the strike plate. the two danced momentarily, the door attempting a clumsy seduction, but they just didn’t click.

—

they had been broadsided by a drunk driver’s four-ton lifted truck, whose front grille had gone directly through the driver’s door, taking his wife’s life in a mercifully short instant. whether out of love, sadism, or both, though, the gods had saved my uncle from so much as a scrape.
he had stormed out of the new truck’s completely unscathed passenger door, the blinding white flame of his passion burning away all of his moral checks and balances. within seconds, my great-uncle had smashed through the drunk driver’s door, yanked the lock open, dragged the stuporous driver from the seat onto the hard, unforgiving pavement, and beaten him to within an inch of his life.
the driver needed only a few hours in the emergency room to go one more inch.

the jury acquitted my great-uncle of all charges after less than twenty minutes of deliberation.

—

“no… fuck, no.”
louisville had decided to be gutsy and try the two-point conversion, going for the big upset rather than settling for the tie. ohio state’s defense had correctly anticipated a pass play and had sent a heavy rush, forcing the louisville quarterback to float a desperation toss that glided tantalizingly out of reach above the intended receiver’s head.
ohio state 20, louisville 19.

—

the door, which was in plain view, had begun to drift back open into the still, humid air of west louisville.
silently, inexorably, at a steady angular velocity too slow to be perceptible, the door drifted back open, releasing some of my uncle’s pent-up passion into the dank, darkly aromatic, eerily silent night. a cloud of moths, clustered around the flickering yellow light outside, took this as an invitation.

—

my great-uncle’s otherwise unbearably monotone, gritty, tragedy-wracked life was animated by only three things: his faith, his family, and the louisville cardinals.
the saying that ardent fans live and die with their teams is usually meant metaphorically, but it became a literal truth in the year my great-uncle lost his wife.

his family was slowly dwindling, taken by accidents, cancer, violence, and disease.
his God had answered his faith by sparing him from the accident, but, with all the other things He had to attend to, had callously forgotten to do the same for his wife.

that year the oft-maligned cardinals posted their best season in school history, destroyed alabama on new year’s day, and very possibly saved my great-uncle’s life.
the following year, once my great-uncle had learned to handle the grief to the point where he no longer needed them, the cardinals reverted to their usual form, again losing more games than they won.

—

“NO!”
he stared at the old radio with visible shock.
louisville had successfully converted an onside kick and had run the ball all the way to the red zone — but the play was nullified, since the ball had traveled just shy of the requisite ten yards before being touched by a louisville player.

—

by this point, the door had drifted fully perpendicular to the frame, allowing the moths the run of the house.

—

final score, ohio state 20, louisville 19.
my great-uncle collapsed back onto the couch, despondent. “we shouldn’t have gone for the win. too greedy, you get nothing.”
one-and-a-half sentences. i was impressed with his verbosity.

“shit.
fuck!”

what?

“i forgot to shut the door.”

i sat there, sharing his burden as i best could.
in years past his wife would have sat next to him, wordless, putting her arms around him until it was time for him to go to the bathroom yet again.
but now it was just him.
and family like me, who would make the trip to visit when we could.
and the louisville cardinals.

—

—

the questions i haven’t been able to answer:

is it better to love deeply, never knowing when that love might be ripped away, or not to love at all?

is it a gift, or a tragedy, that i’ve come to see women as so alike that i will probably never feel that sort of love, no matter how i might want to?

if i learn exactly how to bond a woman to me, how to bond myself to her, and how to continually strengthen that bond — and i do so, consciously — can that still be called love?

—

the other thing i figured out that night:

the door opened so silently, slowly, and smoothly that its opening had become imperceptible.
so imperceptible, in fact, that my great-uncle had entirely forgotten the initial state — his having shut the door, even with such sound and fury — and had transferred the responsibility onto himself.

the key to successfully transforming your woman is to be like the brand-new oil in those door hinges.
be the lubricant that allows her to change, and the gravity that forces her to change, in the ways that will keep her enthralled.
slowly.
smoothly.
implicitly.

if you transform her slowly, smoothly, implicitly, and skilfully enough, she’ll wake up one day and realize that she is your slut, yours to do anything you want with, for as long as you want — or at least for as long as you keep pushing.
and she won’t know how she got there.
she won’t even realize that it was your conscious (wo)manipulation.

it just happened. … because you made it happen.
we know how women love when things just happen.

we grew closer. … because you’ve created everything she has become.i respect him. … because you own her.i trust him. … because you know her better than she knows herself.

he makes me feel like a woman.

i can be myself around him.

i forgot to shut the door.

the most powerful forces are those that we don’t see, don’t feel, and don’t notice, until they have transformed us.

POST THE SECOND
in which the Author reveals that PUA-style pickup game is not for everyone**

The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
[your] times are in [your] hand
[so say] “A whole I planned”

— adapted from robert browning

**this fact is almost universally overlooked in “the community”, not least because noting it would drastically slash the size of the target audience to which the community’s ersatz leaders hawk their products.

—

let’s begin by throwing personality types into a sieve, sifting vigorously, and seeing what shakes out.

broadly speaking, men’s ways of striving for experience and achievement — in the very inclusive sense of the term, covering everything from boldfaced résumé mainstays to drunken escapades — lie on a continuum.

at one extreme of this continuum are what i’ll call “vertical integrators”, men who seek to build something cumulative, with many overlaid layers of significance, development, and meaning. these are the thoroughgoing monomaniacs who dedicate their lives to building specific industry-niche businesses at work, or, if they find no such calling, to creating the industry niches themselves; to developing hard-earned talents, with a flat return curve prior to virtuoso level, at their esoteric pursuits; and to building large, patriarchal families.

at the other extreme are what i’ll call “horizontal integrators”, the dilettantes, dabblers, rogues, and picaroons who look to sample as many different swatches as possible from the mottled tapestry of life. drifters in good days and derelicts in bad, these are the restless transients who defy the law prohibiting perpetual motion. at work, at play, and in (and out of and in and out of and in and out of) love, they value diversity over depth. they are like junk bonds — their values may vary greatly from one hour to the next — but they never stray too far from the notion that quantity has a quality all its own.

these two categories correspond, very roughly, to one narrowly defined dimension of the alpha/beta dichotomy, although it would be foolish to define a reductionist alpha/beta dichotomy according to them.

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the above is not a binary, nor is it a bimodal distribution; it’s a continuum on which lies a skewed bell curve, whose median lies on the side of vertical integration.

surely there are some chameleons, who masquerade as vertical integrators just long enough to have plausible deniability for their rogue exploits.
and for each of these sneaky fuckers, we can find an antithesis: a man of predominantly conservative disposition, who periodically emerges from the woodwork to white-knuckle a few peer-pressured bouts of chemically assisted derring-do, strutting and fretting his 15 minutes upon the stage in an ill-advised attempt to catch and sing the sun in flight.
these types notwithstanding, though, most men in modern western society are vertical integrators. of the minority who prefer azimuth to altitude, most will find themselves gazing inexorably further away from the horizon and toward the sky with the passing years, as time gradually whittles away their supply of the great horizontal integrator known as testosterone.

-.– — ..- –..– – — — –..– … …. .- .-.. .-.. .–. .- … …

ok, so, who cares?
you should.
because, for vertical integrators (that’s most of you guys out there), pick-up artistry is a sweet-tasting, slow-acting poison.

if you are a vertical integrator working at building or improving a long-term relationship, then do not use mystery-method-style PUA techniques.
notice the word “techniques”. you can and should still use reputable PUA material — especially from sources that have achieved prominence based on quality alone — to strip away the pretty lies and reconstruct the real real world, from first principles.
but, unless you’re getting incredibly lucky at an oversized game of battleships, you should not proceed a1 a2 a3 c1 c2 c3 s1 s2 s3 with your long-term prospect. this sequence can and will get you laid, but in the long term it will almost certainly be counterproductive, causing you to be blown out of the water as soon as the proverbial paint begins to dry.

first, understand that PUA game is to long-term relationships what a hammer is to a phillips-head screw; although one would think it obvious from the name, many people need to be reminded that PUA techniques are designed for pick-up, not for hold ’em.
it is designed for a task whose payoffs are not cumulative. it’s pure horizontal integration — a sisyphean task, of essentially constant difficulty level, repeated ad nauseam.
can you learn to write a novel by writing 1000 opening vignettes?
can you become a chessmaster by becoming really good at the catalan?
no.
NO.
you can’t.
but the PUA fellows are telling, and selling, the notion that you can.
fool, money, parted.
worse, though, PUA techniques are not just some inert chemical in the mix of a long-term relationship. in the conception, nurturing, and birth of a long-term relationship, PUA techniques play the role of thalidomide — allowing the birth to occur, but crippling the potential and shortening the life of the bond.
why?
as stated before, women are elastic bands.
effective PUA game works by stretching those bands at an extremely rapid velocity — rapid enough to produce consistent and reliable one-night stands for proficient practitioners.
and yes, haters, it works.
so what’s the problem?
the problem is that PUA technique gets you from point a to point s3 really quickly, and then locks up like a grocery cart that’s just hit the yellow line around the parking lot.
do you want your nascent relationship to end not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the dull thud of a grocery cart ramming into your solar plexus?
didn’t think so.
neither did neil strauss, who was the best pua in the world until he met his own grocerycarterloo — when his beloved lisa leveridge, about whom he had waxed so sentimental at the end of the game, unceremoniously dumped him after the exact period of time that normally characterizes rotating polyandry.
ahem.
want to make it across the desert? don’t drive the car that goes really fast but gets six miles per gallon.

close your eyes and imagine the elastic in the waistbands of cheap clothing.
or one of the gummy erasers of decades past, small chunks of which could be gently and lovingly — with a little friction and heat — drawn out to a length of several feet, starting from less than an inch, given just the right amount of pressure.

the fundamental polymeric structure of these materials will gradually distend in response to constant pressure, stretching the material permanently — if, and only if, this pressure is skilfully applied just beyond the elastic’s threshold of comfort. if the pressure is steadily applied at this barely supra-threshold rate, the material is gradually slackened to a length unattainable by a single, more powerful impulse.

women are like this, too.
as are men.
as are frogs in pots of water slowly heated to boiling.

but women are especially vulnerable, since their very nature compels them to search for that je ne sais quoi** that is exactly 0.1 standard deviations past their “limit”.
pushing the envelope.

so, how is the elastic stretched?THRILL is a quality that begins a few inches inside the envelope of prior experience.DISCOMFORT, however, does not begin until a few inches outside the envelope.
there are, of course, exceptions; some phobics feel discomfort will into the interior of the envelope, while some adrenaline junkies don’t feel thrill until miles outside it. however, for most decently well-adjusted people, the above conditions obtain.

the most addictive experiences for women (and for men, too), then, are those that lie on, OR BARELY OUTSIDE, the envelope of experience — simultaneously maximizing the factor of thrill and minimizing that of discomfort.

importantly, though — and this is the single factor that causes many long-term relationships to fail, especially among PUA the types who have learned to approach and seduce women at high velocities — this tension on a woman’s “envelope” will gradually cause the elastic to expand.
and the Thrill and Discomfort borderlines recede.
and she chases them.
and a slut is made.
and elastic never goes back.